I’ve been using the tool by MCS Clans and it’s quite useful with its sorting filters and such.

The MCS Bot Script is useful in that it auto-builds the buildings for you, one by one. It’ll stop either when you run out of space, get a chance card, or run out of money. I just let it go and open another tab and browse the internet, checking back and forth every few minutes. It’s definitely quicker than doing it manually.

Also, the Bot Script is kinda jacked in that the window that pops up for you to select which building to auto-build has the number 6 (in relation to which building to build) already inserted. For some reason the first building (Green House) is numbered as 6, so for example The Sentinel is 9, The Grid is 13 and The Photat is 18.

Essentially what is happening is that you are installing a downloader….It downloads the latests version of the scripts from the MCS Clans site.

Whilst that sort of behaviour can be explained by a developer as simplify the delivery and distribution of the scritp and to make sure that all users have the same script, For that very reason it carries a HIGH risk…The script being downloaded can be changed, so even if you inspect it today and it looks fine then script delivered tommorow might be significantly different.

I Also note that they are sending a random number in the request to retrieve the js file. This too raises my concerns, something like that can be used to sometimes serve one version of a script….ie one that is not malicious….and sometimes another version that might be malicious.

Finally even if the MCS Tools team is completely honest and this is all above board you would still have to trust that someone else isnt able to update the javascript file that is being downloaded.

For a script like this to be considered SAFE the entire source must be available on the userscripts site. This was the case for this script upto version 0.3 bassed on the diffs…so if you wanted to you could reconstruct the 0.3 version and that would be fine.

Miselfs Script version 0.3 is the same it downloads the actual script form a secondard site…google sites in theis case,

This script too must be considered HIGH RISK

The bot on userscripts from mocols in version 0.4 is SAFE. It does what it says it does and there are no file downloads the full source is provided on the userscripts site.

The bot on overclockers looks to be a standalone windows app that is talking directly with the game servers….id class that as an EXTREME RISK and advise anyone installing it to make sure that they do not allow it to run on their machine with Admin privilages.

The signature generators and stats displays are all safe…so long as you only need to provide them with your user name (that all that should be required)

At the end of the day, the people who have created these bots have already demonstrated that they are willing to play outside of the rules….So it pays to be extremely carefull.

Scion thanks for the analysis! luckily the mocols one is the only one i’ve actually tried using so far. thanks for the assurance. I wonder what miselfs and the clans folk make of it – i can only assume folks that far invested in the game wouldn’t be malicious – but I’d love for them to address your security concerns

I finally gave in and am now using Mocols script. I am simply using it to clear my green houses and replace them with Grids. With my luck, I will get kicked out as being a “cheater” even though I have never made a trade, only have 1 account, didn’t even use any of the tools to find my streets. Oh well. I have come to the dark side.

With Regards to the question of whether i think the use of bots is cheating…ive ummed and ahhhh’d about that for a while now.

In many games there is a specific rule that says that the game interface must be used and as supplied, and that it is forbidden to scrape data from the website or make automated requests to the server …your typical no bots rule.

Last time i looked over the MCS rules they wernt in there.

And then i look at the mocols bot and all it does is to automate the process that a human does when they are either building or demolishing buildings….the find cone/ jump-to function could be considered a grey area since that is not strictly available through the standard interface.

Initially had you asked me i would have said that a bot like that was not on…bassed on common rules in other games….but ive never seen a game where as you get a progresively better location the UI speed gets substantially worse. … Now Im looking at it slightly differently, In 2 more weeks at my current projected rate of growth it is simply not going to be possible to play without some sort of automation, either in game or through the use of bots.

Where i would draw the line is in bots that provide functions that can not reasonably be recreated by a user….so for instance bots that monitor the alerts box for attacks and then build houses in the empty spots, or bots that automate street finding by trawling the globe. Id also include bots that considerably alter the user interface of the game, providing a user with significantly more information than the standard interface.

agreed – i declare it ‘not cheating’ … it’s definitely a game enhancer, i can’t imagine how this game is even playable at this point without the bot. the dev team really needs to look at integrating something like this immediately.

For anyone worried about having to execute javascript stored remotely, you can host the javascript file locally, using mamp or wamp, and edit the script to load your local file instead of the remote file. I’m doing that now and it works just fine, this way you won’t have to worry about any stealth updates to the remote script. Of course any good updates, you will need to overwrite your local file.

The main reason of this step (loading the main script from our site) is that we are also maintaining a bookmarklet, and a greasemonkey version of this script. So we decided to create two loader script only and maintaining our script a central place.

What do you think? What method would be considered harmless? Do you have any idea?

It’s only me or the auto-build feature of MCS Tools the game “calls” negative Chance Cards? I got 5 negative Chance Cards and lost about 300 Million in that. It happened everytime I use the auto-build.

I’ve tried MCSbot for two days now and both times ended up broke because of bad chance cards. Another problem is that MCSbot seems to buy buildings, but they do not always appear on the map. On a straight street I’ve many blank spots now which can’t be filled with grid buildings anymore.

Maybe it is just bad luck, or maybe the today’s “maintenance”, but I got about 230 Mil on today’s payday, started building Grid’s on a new street and within a few buildings got a -$70 mil card, then a -$10 mil and then another -$70 mil wiping me out.

we’ll i know the answer, I tried MCSTOOLS and every building I built with it was removed by google today, so that totally sucks. I personally don’t think its cheating at all, it just mimics the hand clicks so u can work on other things. Either way, I lost 230M worth of income

I guess it is more than a coincidence. This is crazy, there are still people in top 10′s that are clear cheaters (only own one street, covered in hazards, yet still grow money). And yet they are going after us who don’t want to aggravate our carpal tunnel.

So have they been doing updates to the site? I see/saw no mention of it on the blog

I’ve been using MCS Tools script to auto-build for me for a few days now and I’ve had no issues with it, nor have I had any of my buildings removed. My negative chance cards seem to have decreased and I get a crapload more demo/prison/sewage/factory cards, sometimes one after another. Incidentally, I had the auto-build on as I was typing this and I looked at the page and I had been hit with an almost $100m negative card.

I’d have absolutely no problem with doing it manually if the site was as fast as it should be, but doing it manually at the moment involves me spending 30 minutes and averaging about a building every 30 seconds. It should be instant, so until they get their game together then I’ll continue using a script and if the penalise me for it then I’ll stop playing.

TJ – u r lucky I’m thinking that maybe…because I have 2 computers at my desk, I would login to each of them, use auto builder on 1 and then manually search for a long road on the other…maybe that is why they destroyed one of my roads. Either-way I was not cheating, I was working smarter not harder…but there is nothing we can do, I’ll never get an individual response from them.

I´m still getting those “many requests” warning. Maybe if they did a “to do list” bot that would do things in a slower pace and ignore the cards (or auto-build the bonus buildings).
And auto-sell would be great too…

So r people using MCSTools and nothing is happening? Should I try it again. I hate to have to spend hours building properties. Any tricks on how u use it. Also, how can google tell I’m using MCSTools? Any advice would be awesome. cheers!

I cannot see how there can be a higher risk/chance of getting negative chance cards when your using a bot.

For it to do that it would either need to send it as additional information to the server during the requests, or on the server side have soem rather powerfull user behaviour analysis going on….the first is not happening, the second, come on …. get real….MCS itself is still bug ridden and they have enough trouble just ironing them out.

What is simply far more likely is that because you have the bot now you are more likely to try and build more smaller buildings and subsequently receive more chance cards and thus more negaives…then there is also the (what’s it called) effect where you attribute a causal relation ship to what is still actually a random event.

With regards to the problems some people have been experiencing with building buildings and the cash being removed and the building not showing up…ive witnessed this myself, in my situation it was because i had pulled a negative chance card but not played the flash for the card….so my displayed balance was still at its original level….the build process would let me try and build the building but after submission the server tries to validate the build requests see that my true balance isnt high enough and doesnt add the building (this is a good thing, and at least they got that bit right)

So i think the reason why people complain about this sort of thing is that their frontend balance gets out of sync with their real balance. (you can allways re-sync your balance by clicking the refresh button in the alerts box)

I definitely agree with Scion for everyone wondering about the negative chance cards and bots… there is no way the MCS team has it in them at the moment to program something that nuanced into the game.

Found this script (webinterface: http://knotenberlin.de/mcs.php) on a german computerboard. Just enter nick and get the stats. It also have add info on the streets who own some1; exp. houses, rent value, offers (and what is offered) and so on. Usefull to check some1 quickly, i think. Its in german, but easy to understand.

I added the MCS thingy and it didn’t really work, so I deleted it. Now I can’t buy anything at all – HELP!!!! It says something weird has happened whenever I try.

Also, even before I added it, I could only sell/demolish one building at a time. As in, to sell another one, I have to sign out, close the window and start again from scratch. If I don’t do this, I get nothing when I click on the little plus sign to view info about a building.